November 13,
2008 - Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (Half-Life, Portal, Team
Fortress, and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (Steam and Source), today
announced its upcoming zombie thriller, Left 4 Dead, has gone gold and is now
pre-loading to those who pre-purchased the game via Steam.

Left 4 Dead is the new survival action game from Valve for the PC and Xbox 360
that blends the social entertainment experience of multiplayer games such as
Counter-Strike and Team Fortress with the dramatic, narrative experience made
popular in single player action game classics such as the Half-Life series of
games.

Those who pre-order the game via Steam save 10% off the regular price and may
pre-load the game so they are able to play at 12:01 am EST on November 18, 2008
when the game is made available.

The pre-order discount is also available for both the PC and 360 versions at
participating retail outlets.

Playable in single player, co-operative, and multiplayer modes, Left 4 Dead is
one of the most anticipated releases of 2008 and winner of numerous pre-launch
awards, including Best of E3 from multiple outlets. The official
demo for the game is
available now through November 17 for the PC and Xbox 360.

The servers are a mess. It would be nice to be able to filter vanilla servers with no preset info on them and ignore all the rest. I have been on some where music was piped in and played on top of the game and could not be turned off or down. So freaking annoying!

great great game, ive owned it for just 2 days and i cant stop playing it.

personally i am far form a fan boi of valve, i fucking hated Halflife, and Halflife2 (or shall i just call it .. loading screen game), and i think whilst TF2 was excellent fun, lets face it it butchered PROPER fortress CTF with this zerg mode games.

anyhow my point is, didnt like valves games in general, liked TF2 and CS a bit but they are both ripped off mods with dev polich on them.

this game however, i am really digging. the servers are a fucking mess and nothing we are used to thesedays (meaning silly lobby system and such) but having said that its AWSOME fun to play.

i do think its a little short on content but frankly the way the mobs are randomised keeps it interesting.

lots of fun, i guess longevity remains to be seen, but still its lots of fun, if very expensive for what is a professionally made modification.

/Theo

Everyone on Bluesnews is synical, get over it. edit: i cant spell, this is my disclaimer.

I like it and was impressed, especially with multiplayer. I died so fast. LOL! You really need to play with others together. I love being the shotgunner. Good idea, Valve. I love how the game requires team work. Example of me (Luis) was injured (incapacitated) as shown in my screen capture: http://img374.imageshack.us/img374/2923/screenshotvc8.jpg ... When low on health, you move slower too! Awesome. I might actually get this game later on (want to see if the game gets popular, updated with new stuff, etc.). And price is high though IMO.

Seems like there's enough interesting content if I can get 16 hours of fun out of 2 parts of one campaign. It's nice how things screw up at the worst time, and you never know when that will be - could be when you get puked on in the back alley right as a wave starts, could be when you nick the car accidentally, or a smoker could grab your buddy just as you're all jumping down a hole with no way back up to save him. It's more challenging when you can do everything right and still wind up dead, especially since the bad luck never feels forced or contrived. Just when you get comfortable, you round a corner and blow a boomer up in your face when he startles you. Or you're doing really well, when a smoker wraps one up, a hunter knocks down another, and the wave makes it so much harder to do anything about it, and you're shooting and swinging frantically to stay alive - it's a strong sense of achievement to overcome the really bad luck moments, if you do. If you let it, the game can really evoke a feeling of being alone in a very hostile place full of things with a single-minded desire to kill you.

Haha, I rest my case. So much for your perpetual "L4D has more content than TF2" argument.

Uh, what? You're resting your case based on the fact that TF2 shipped with 6 maps, L4D ships with 20, and of those, 8 of them will allow versus mode. I'd love to hear your rationalization for how 6 maps for a purely versus mode game is more content than 8 maps of versus and 20 maps of co-op.

I spit my coffee all over my monitor and keyboard at the thought of someone thinking L4D is a better game than TF2, in any sense of the imagination. Don't worry about the hardware, my work will get over it.

You're still here? You've been bitching since the second post in this thread about how terrible a game it is, you'd think you'd have moved on by now.

Oh, and I never said Left 4 Dead is a better game than TF2 Though I certainly have had more fun with the Left 4 Dead demo than I remember having at Team Fortress 2's release.

In versus mode, eight players are split into two teams of four and put in control of the survivors and infected. In each string of maps, of which there are four total, there are subsections. Each subsection starts off with the survivors in a safe room where they can stock up on ammunition, weapons, and health packs. They then need to sprint out a door into the open and make their way to the safe room at the end of the subsection. In the campaign mode, you just continue through until you reach the end of the map string. In versus, players play each subsection twice on both sides. So if you play through the first time on the survivor side, you'll play through next as infected. After each round the survivor team is scored based on their distance travelled across the subsection, their remaining health, and the score is multiplied by a difficulty rating and the number of team members left. This is added up across each subsection and totaled at the end of the map string to determine a winner. Then it's back to the waiting lobby where both teams can mercilessly insult or congratulate each other.

Personally I would like to see players being able to take control of the Infected bosses in Campaign mode, but that doesn't seem to be an option in the full game. Doubt it will take long for modders to make it so however.

It amounts to about 6-7 hours for one playthrough. Considering that a 20-30 minute demo extended easily into 8+ hours....I'd say a 6-7 hour campaign is very reasonable.

But you're also again forgetting about the Versus mode that supports 10 levels - remember that Team Fortress 2 only had 6 on release.

I spit my coffee all over my monitor and keyboard at the thought of someone thinking L4D is a better game than TF2, in any sense of the imagination. Don't worry about the hardware, my work will get over it.

Our thinking is that you'll tie a Steam group directly to your game server, and then allowing people inside of that group to browse and connect to it. The server would be able to pull people from this method, and from matchmaking at the same time.

hmmm, if that is the case, and the levels are roughly all the same size, kind of a small game....

It amounts to about 6-7 hours for one playthrough. Considering that a 20-30 minute demo extended easily into 8+ hours....I'd say a 6-7 hour campaign is very reasonable.

But you're also again forgetting about the Versus mode that supports 10 levels - remember that Team Fortress 2 only had 6 on release.